Art Inspiration – Mathew Ritchie’s Parents and Children

One of the strongest impulses in my desire to make art is to pull from the many exhilarating and profound ideas I have encountered through reading and learning about the sciences. From astronomy, to chemistry, to biology I have always found what lies in science to be the deepest and most enlivening source for vision and concept.

But these ideas are not always an easy marriage to my own personal visual vocabulary structure. Finding places to meld them together – to connect and combine – is where I think the most challenging and interesting components of my work as a creator exists.

Its also very obvious how this drove me right to the work of Mathew Ritchie. What Ritchie does in combining and formulating a kind of narrative pulled from science, mythology, and his own experiences has always been a tremendous source of inspiration and emotional resonance.

Ritchie’s abstractions always seem to me that they would be as comfortable in a comic book or an anime, as they are in a gallery. His images raise questions in their mix of suggestive characters, mathematical formulas, and half -articulated allusions, and it is those questions that linger with you long after you view them. There are tremendous layers of complexity to Ritchie’s work that are very compelling, but they are also familiar and accessible, if never truly comfortable.

As a college student I first came across Ritchie’s work “Parents and Children,” at Andrea Rosen during a regular visit to Chelsea. And from their I think it is very fair to say that his work altered the way I view myself as a creator, and the goals I have as a creator.